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WATER POLITICS

Earlier this year (but just discovered now), the Common Language Project explored issues from Ethiopia and Kenya, two countries at the forefront of the world’s coming water crisis. And, as the article notes, the liquid that fuels bodies is becoming even more contentious than the liquid that fuels cars in East Africa:

“…As you may know, Alex, the coming World War Three will be fought over water, not oil..

The director of a local water NGO told me this just a few days after I arrived in Ethiopia in January. Variations on that refrain were echoed by aid workers and researchers across the region over the next several months.

The fringes of Ethiopia’s fertile Highlands are dotted with camps housing refugees from water-based conflict in the rest of the country.

A few kilometers outside the ancient Muslim city of Harar, alongside a dry river bed, lies one such camp of 5,000 ethnic Somalis. They were driven from the Ogaden region by inter-clan conflict over access to water and pastureland. The camp is a sprawling expanse of small, wood-framed domes covered with a patchwork of plastic and other scrap material, the only material families could scavenge to shield themselves from the incessant beating of the equatorial sun.

These people lost all the livestock that were their livelihood, as well as many of their family members, to the conflict, and they now survive on the meat of cactuses and occasional handouts from the locals. In recent months that hospitality has begun to wear thin as well.

To get the water they need to drink and wash they dig into the sandy bottom of the dry riverbed until they’ve scratched deep enough to reveal the muddy water that flows beneath.

The elders of the village earnestly described their situation to me, asking hopefully if I knew anyone who could help, but even then I suspected that their story wouldn’t ever find its way into print. After all, the scale of their tragedy couldn’t compare to other African conflicts that are making the news, and there wasn’t any element of geopolitical intrigue here – just poor people fighting over water. I cursed myself for not thinking to at least bring a flat of bottled water when we came to visit the camp.

But taking a broader view, I later realized that the scale of this story is massive. Refugees from similar conflicts over access to shrinking water and pastureland are scattered across southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya.

Pastoralists are especially vulnerable to climate change because they already live so close to the margins, dependant on grazing their cattle and camels in areas where agriculture isn’t viable. A small decrease in rainfall can be a death sentence for animals if sparse watering holes go dry. But most herders are already armed against predators, and will sooner clash with other groups to get access to water then stand by and watch their animals die.

The two main insurgencies currently beleaguering the Ethiopian government are devoted to the independence of Oromia and the Ogaden, both long-neglected lowland areas with large pastoralist populations. Neighboring Somalia, which for over fifteen years has been dismembered by inter-clan conflicts like the one that displaced the refugees we visited in Ethiopia, is an extension of the same arid lowland and is almost entirely populated by pastoralists as well. Even the genocides in Darfur and Rwanda were borne from the cultural collision between pastoralists and farmers in the same land.

There’s no denying that these are all politically motivated conflicts, but the role water scarcity plays in creating the preconditions of desperation and discontent is equally undeniable.

“Water is life”

This is another phrase repeated over and over again by East African aid workers. But a more revealing variation might be “water symbolizes wealth.”

Wherever there is poverty, water problems are paramount. Even in highland urban capitols like Addis Ababa and Nairobi, where temperatures are cool and rains are plentiful, access to clean drinking water and sanitation facilities tops the list of problems cited by slum dwellers, who make up half the population of some cities. Deaths from waterborne disease typically exceed those from AIDS , though water diseases usually receive less attention.

In Nairobi, city water infrastructure comes to a halt at the edge of Kibera, the continent’s second largest slum. An informal private sector of water vendors takes over from there, jerry-rigging a network of cheap plastic pipes and water tanks that allow the water to be tainted with free flowing sewage. The million people who live in Kibera typically end up paying hundreds of times more than those in other Nairobi neighborhoods for water that still makes them sick.

Slum residents, especially young men, are angry about this kind of government neglect. Tensions increase further when such neglect appears to exist along ethnic lines.

When slum residents riot, as they did following last December’s elections in Kenya, it is usually presented in the media as violence in a vacuum, or purely as ethnic strife. But it’s no coincidence that this kind of violence often breaks out in places where people lack access to basic services like water, and don‘t have many other options for getting the attention of their political leaders. When chaos erupted in Kibera in January, some of the first targets for vandalism were tanks owned by water vendors who had been price gouging the locals for years.

“Some of us will be alive to see it happen”

That’s what a Ugandan environmentalist told me about the nightmare prospect of the world’s second largest lake drying up completely.

Lake Victoria’s levels have receded by several meters in recent years, destroying the breeding grounds for fish, endangering the 30 million East Africans who live around the lake, and setting the stage for international conflict.

Kenyan fishermen chasing fish into deeper Ugandan waters have been arrested and allegedly tortured by Ugandan military. Fisherman from the two countries have also clashed with each other directly.

In addition to rising temperatures, decreased rainfall, and watershed deforestation, scientists and fishermen alike blame new hydroelectric projects at the source of the River Nile in Uganda from draining too much water out of the rapidly shrinking lake.

Motivated by desperation or revenge, Kenyan fisherman in the shallows don’t hesitate to harvest baby fish, sealing the future fates of the fishermen from all three countries who share the lake.

Without international cooperation on plans for conservation, this sort of tit for tat race to exploit resources faster than your neighbor will ensure that Lake Victoria will end up like other devastated bodies of water like the Aral Sea and Lake Chad.

But international conflict over the water resources of the Lake Victoria/Nile River system seems almost inevitable. The nine countries that share the system (Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo) are some of the world’s poorest nations and their populations are exploding, exponentially increasing stress on endangered water resources.

Just as Kenyan farmers are decreasing inflows into Lake Victoria by cutting forests in its watersheds, the Ugandan government is increasing outflows by running more water through its new dams into the Nile. Just as Ethiopians are pushing to industrialize their agricultural sector for export, putting new land under irrigation, hundreds of miles downriver, Egypt is channeling millions of gallons of water out of the river to “reclaim” vast swaths of desert.

While any one of these issues alone might get attention in the local, or even international press every once in awhile, the world seems to have averted its eyes from the combined threat to this massive ecosystem.

With the current regional population of 387 million on course to double in the next thirty years, the equation of available gallons of water from this system just doesn’t add up. Movements for international cooperation such as the Nile Basin Initiative have yielded some promising results, but in a corner of the world already fraught with tense rivalries, control over the most basic human resource is almost certain to be an impetus for violent conflict.

For Americans, environmentalism has traditionally been a misanthropic affair.

We’’re primarily concerned with preserving natural beauty for its own sake and protecting nature from the advances of civilization.

But in East Africa, itself home to an impressive environmental movement, environmentalism is inseparable from humanitarianism. Here, when ecosystems are destroyed, people are almost always directly harmed as well, even if they are the ones doing the destroying.

The experiences of Africans struggling to find fish in Lake Victoria or fighting over dwindling pastureland for their livestock in Ethiopia might not seem like particularly important stories for small-town American news audiences. But even ignoring the direct contribution Americans may be making to these distant problems in the form of climate change, these small stories are relevant to us for what they tell us about the big story that usually goes untold — the story of the entire planet as an ecological whole.

When violence over access to basic resources like water erupts among people who depend directly on the earth for their survival, it is an important reminder.”